


Celebratory Drinking Games

by CopperCaravan



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: All/Most Characters Mentioned, Drinking, F/M, Fenera Mahariel, Infertility (mentioned), Pranks and Practical Jokes, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-14
Updated: 2015-09-16
Packaged: 2018-04-20 19:07:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4798976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCaravan/pseuds/CopperCaravan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few weeks after the assault on Vigil's Keep, Nathaniel gets a letter from Delilah with good news: he's an uncle now. Nathaniel and Mahariel take part in some celebratory drinking that becomes very undignified rather quickly and involves lots of digs at Orlesians, as well as Nathaniel engaging in general lover-boy gaping, blushing, and stuttering. A few brief moments of seriousness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> To make up for my week long (and unplanned) hiatus, here's the night of indignity Nathaniel mentions in chapter 20 of Continuity. Also, because canon dictates I can't properly punish Rolan for his sins, I made sure I got at least a little satisfaction from his discomfort (although that's mostly in the second half).

He has no idea why he goes to Mahariel. Doesn’t even think about it, really.

Sigrun has been asking after Delilah and the baby since they’d found out she was expecting. Anders too. And Justice. And, certainly, this is an occasion for celebratory drinking. What with Oghren constantly toasting Felsi and “the nugget,” he’d be an obvious choice.

But no, he finds himself clutching the letter and taking long, quick strides to her room.

Funny, how seamlessly it had become _her_ room and no longer his mother’s room. Funny, too, how often he found himself in there with her.

He pushes her door open. Before, he’d have always knocked. To enter a lady’s room uninvited and unannounced? Maker, his parents would have burst into rage induced flames, and he’d certainly never do it elsewhere. But she’s chastised him enough that he knows better than to knock, so he just goes in.

The room is surprisingly tidy, which means she’s been cleaning, which means she’s stressed. Velanna’s blankets are stuffed in the corner of Mahariel’s bed—seems she’s been sleeping in here often these days. He doesn’t allow himself the question.

Mahariel is sitting at her desk, so focused on the letter she’s reading that she doesn’t seem to notice his entry. Another change he’d not expected, her so comfortable with her would-be killer. Her brows are drawn together and her lips pursed; whatever it is, she’s frustrated.

“Everything alright?” He takes a step toward her and she looks up at him.

“Fine,” she says, but he doesn’t believe it. “Just some news from a friend of mine.”

He sits on the edge of her desk, his own letter all but forgotten as he takes in the concern in her voice. “Not good news, then?”

She flattens her letter against the desk with the palm of her hand, brows knitting back together with thought, and shakes her head. “It’ll be fine,” she says and sighs. “He can handle it. He can.” She’s quiet for a moment, and he wonders where her mind is, who she’s got so heavy on her mind and what sort of danger this man’s found himself in (doesn’t seem that she has any friends who don’t find themselves in some sort of danger on a regular basis). “I’m sorry, Nathaniel, did you need me for something?” Her Commander Voice is back, which is maybe better than her Worried Voice—or rather, less concerning, at least. But he didn’t come in here looking for his Commander; he just wants Mahariel.

He remembers his letter, a bit crinkled now, having been clutched a bit too tightly in his hand when he’d seen her expression. “Delilah’s had the baby,” he tells her and, despite his worry for her and her worry for her friend, he can’t stop the grin spreading across his face. She smiles too, a rare show of teeth and her tattoos wrinkling with the movement. He hands her the letter, but she needn’t read it because of course he continues, rambling like he’s happy and drunk. To be fair, the former is very true and the latter will hopefully soon be as well. “I’ll admit, I wasn’t thrilled that they’d stayed in Kirkwall; I was hoping they’d go to Wycome, or Ostwick, but Delilah’s as stubborn as our mother and the Maker himself couldn’t get to her do something she doesn’t want to. I’m just glad she left when we told her, what with Amaranthine...” The grin falters on Mahariel’s face for just a second and he wants to smack his hand against his forehead for the slip. He tries to recover though, when he sees her slap the smile back in place, for his sake, no doubt. “A little boy, healthy. The delivery went well too, which is a relief—it wasn’t nearly so easy for our mother with Thomas and I was a bit worried. Albert’s beaming, she says.” He pauses, thinking of Albert. He seemed a nice enough fellow, it’s just that Nathaniel wishes he’d had time to get to know him better.

As though she can read his mind, she pulls him from his thoughts with a touch to his knee. “He seemed a good man,” she says and the words are reassuring, even though they should mean very little. She’d only met Albert once, and very briefly, but it still means a great deal to him that she says it.

“Yes,” he agrees. “He did.”

“Have you told the others yet? I’d bet every one of them would buy you a drink. Oh gods, Oghren will probably offer you some of that disgusting brew of his. Nathaniel, as a woman who has braved horrors unspeakable, I’m warning you: don’t drink that dragon piss. Don’t do it.” She laughs, but he thinks she’s probably quite serious. There are few drinks stronger than her tolerance and he won’t be testing his luck with them.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I wanted to tell you first.”

Her grin softens and she’s quiet for a moment. She stands up and moves toward the door, waving him to follow her. “Come on, you deserve some celebratory drunkenness—well,” she stops in the doorway and looks back at him, a step behind her. “ _Delilah_ deserves some celebratory drunkenness, but you do too, I think.”

He chuckles at that and follows her down the hall toward the cellar door.

The last time they’d come down here had been over a month ago. Velanna and Anders were arguing (again) and it had escalated to dangerous levels. When he’d gone to the Commander, he’d thought she would break them up, but she’d just dragged him downstairs and they’d had a few drinks while the angry mages had thrown and burned and banged things around upstairs.

Of course, just a couple of weeks ago, she’d used up almost their entire store of liquor to get them all drunk—her Wardens and the Orlesians too—in an attempt to smooth things out between them all. It had, to an extent, been successful, but drinking in a room full of people he didn’t know (and, if he was honest, he had no interest in knowing) wasn’t nearly the same as sneaking down to the cellar to drink up his mother’s well aged wine with Mahariel. He’d take that over drunken Orlesians any day. He’d take it over most things any day, actually.

_We’re overdue for a drink,_ he decides, as they make their way down the stairs.

He watches her lean down and rifle through the labels in his mother’s stash. “Which of these do we want?”

“Just pick whichever you’d like,” he says. It doesn’t much matter to him, honestly, what they drink, so long as it’s with her and so long as he ends up happily drunk.

“I don’t know anything about shem wine,” she says. “We make ours differently. We don’t use _numbers_ of all things.”

“Numbers?” He raises an eyebrow. “Oh, the years? It’s for—you know what never mind that; you’re right. It’s bloody ridiculous.” He steps over to her and eyes the few bottles left, plucking one out at random. “This one’ll do fine.”

No glasses, no Orlesians, and no damned darkspawn. He nods to himself as he pops the cork out of the bottle and Mahariel gets comfortable sitting against the wall. He sits down across from her and offers her the bottle, but she pushes it back toward him. “You’re the new uncle,” she says. “You get the first drink.” So he takes a long swig and when he’s done, he lets out a breath like his mother’s booze is the best thing she ever did for him; in fact, it probably is.

Mahariel reaches for the bottle and takes a few swallows before passing it back to him.

“So how do you do it, then?” He takes another drink, letting the lip of the bottle rest against his mouth for a moment even after he’s done with this round, just for the weight, for the coolness of the glass—a physical reminder that he’s an uncle now. His sister has a baby. She has a family. He has a family again.

“Do what?” Mahariel leans back, slouching against the wall, and lets her legs stretch out in front of her.

“Make Dalish alcohol,” he says, passing her the bottle when she holds out her hand.

“Lots of fruit and barrels and tree bark. And a bit of dirt.” She grins, the uneven one that she has when she’s bullshitting, or when she’s talking about some feat she’d performed during the Blight (although, now he realizes those might not be mutually exclusive circumstances). “And one angry elder to chastise you, then drink the rest up and tell stories.” She takes a long drink and passes back the bottle and looks at the floor. “I’m glad for you, Nathaniel. You know? I am. I’m really glad you got at least some of your family back. I’m sorry about—well, I’m sorry that things...”

He knows what she wants to say, although she must know she doesn’t have to. He doesn’t even really know if he wants her to. He’d come to realize that Rendon really had deserved what he’d gotten. He’s sorry too—sorry that this seems to be slowly becoming some sort of wedge between them, sorry that she doesn’t know it needn’t be. But he’s not so sure he’s sorry Rendon’s dead. And maybe that’s wrong, probably it is, but he doesn’t care. “Thank you for helping me find her,” is all he says. “I’m glad that—I’m glad you’ve been around.”

He takes another drink and swishes what’s left around in the bottle. Maker, they’ve been down here only a quarter of an hour and they’ve downed over half this bottle. He’ll start to feel it soon, he knows, and he’s pleased. They finish off this bottle and he might get her slurring; that would be a great way to celebrate.

She holds out her hand, opening and closing it around the air, waiting impatiently for him to stop looking at it and either drink it or pass it on. _It’s not the damned Urn of Sacred Andraste’s dust,_ he can almost hear her thinking. He hands it to her and she turns it up high, a long, deep drink, and he doesn’t realize he’s watching her throat quite intensely until she’s brought the bottle away and his view is cut off. Luckily, she’d not realized he was gaping like a fool either.

“We can’t have kids, you know. Wardens, I mean. It’s supposed to be damn near impossible,” she says dully, eying the lip of the bottle. She grins though, like she’s got a joke to tell (and, Maker, her jokes are never really very funny, not that he’d tell her that) and she says, “Of course, witches apparently—” But she stops, quite suddenly, and resumes with a dulled tone of voice. “Well, it’s really unlikely, anyway.”

Nathaniel swipes the bottle from her and grins when she looks back up at him. He’d not ever thought she’d be one for having children; certainly he can imagine it ( _I can?_ ) and certainly she’d be a fearsome mother, but he’s never seen her around a child, never heard her speak of children. For all he knows, she doesn’t even like them. So, he’s a bit surprised by her melancholy. 

“Never really imagined I’d have children of my own,” he says, shrugging and taking a drink. That’s not _entirely_ true. There had been periods when he’d considered it, when he’d desired it even, but what with Rendon’s simply refusing to put him forward for marriage, he’d eventually put all thoughts of domesticity behind him. He could’ve married on his own, he supposes, but it had seemed far more trouble than it was worth, honestly. He takes another drink. Rendon’s gone now, his mother and Thomas too. Nothing stopping him anymore and he’s gone off and traded that little freedom for blood that gives him nasty dreams and makes him eat his weight in bread every day. _Not such an uneven trade though, in the end,_ he thinks, passing the bottle back to Mahariel and letting his eyes rest on some stubborn locks of hair, curling into her face.

“We hadn’t really talked about it yet,” she says absently. “I guess I always assumed we'd—” But she swallows the words back with the booze and when she’s done, she doesn’t continue.

He picks up on them though, on _we_ , on _yet._ But he doesn’t press her. Vague as it is, it’s possibly the most personal thing he’s ever managed to squeeze out of those tight lips. Just takes a letter from his sister and a bottle of wine, apparently. He’ll have to pester Delilah to write more. _About happy things though,_ he thinks, tracing the hard line of her mouth with his gaze.

She looks up at him and her smile is right back in place, as though it had never left. “I hope that kid’s a handful for you,” she says. “Pudgey little human baby with your knack for dangerous things and grumpy expressions.”

“Am I grumpy? Hm, I suppose I am, sometimes.” She passes him the bottle and nods for him to finish it off, what little bit is left, and gets up to pull another from the rack.

“You warm up quick enough,” she says, fingering the bottle tops and still turned away so he can’t read her face, which he finds he regrets considerably. “The brooding suits you, or so Oghren says. Nice to see you smiling today though.”

She settles back against the wall, and gives him the bottle to uncork.

“Maybe the kid will get lucky: won’t inherit that ridiculous Howe nose,” she teases, fingers twiddling in the air toward him.

“My—my _nose_?” He pops the cork and passes it back to her, busies himself with his fingertips tracing the tip of his nose, as if he’s forgotten what it looks like. “Why you always going on about my nose?”

“Stop, stop,” she laughs. “You’ve a... lovely nose? Very, um, sort of pointy, actually, isn’t it?”

He laughs too ( _I suppose she_ is _right,_ he thinks) and reaches for the bottle, intending to deny her any more alcohol until she can make civilised conversation. But she holds it away from him and the laughter keeps falling out of her, her body shaking with it and a bit of wine sloshing out and dripping down her arm.

“You’re one to talk about pointy,” he says, leaning so far forward he’s almost in her lap trying to get the bottle away from her. At this point, they’ll have spilled more than they’ll be able to drink. He can’t stop smiling, regardless. They’ve got a few bottles to spare; hell, if it means seeing her like this, he’ll coat the cellar floor in booze. “Your ears must stick out clear three inches from your head. _Pointy._ ”

“Only one of ‘em,” she says, turning to show him her left ear, sloppily healed where the tip has long since been missing. He’d wanted to ask her about it but... well, that seemed like an awfully impolite thing to do. “You shems,” she says, like she’s making a tasteless joke. “Knifing people’s ears.”

He jerks back like she’s slapped him and becomes very aware of how close he was to her. “They—they did that to you?”

He must be wearing quite a face. Her bitter grin goes soft and she passes him the bottle. “Not people like you,” she says quietly.

He takes a very deep drink. He’s not so sure. They’d had elven servants. He didn’t think he’d ever treated them poorly—certainly not cruelly—but he remembers what he’d thought of her, the first time he’d seen her: _an elf, of all things._ He’d been wrong to do it, wrong to think that way, but he’d done it and only come to realize later.

Docking her ears; it’s something he could imagine his parents might’ve done, if they’d thought the offense grave enough. And they’d taught him modesty and etiquette and proper riding. They’d taught him to think things like _an elf, of all things_ and they’d taught him fear and anger and spite. What if they’d taught him that—this mutilation? What if he _had_ been like those people?

The alcohol tastes bitter now, but he keeps drinking nonetheless. Long, heavy pulls until he’s sure he’ll be sick in the morning but at least he’s lessening the sick he feels now, with the thought of how, once upon a time, he may not have been so different from the men who did this to her—how, once upon a time, he snuck back into his family’s home to stain their expensive carpets with as much of her blood as possible.

He can feel it: his mind getting a little fuzzy, a little blurry, a little slow. And he thinks about how he’s come to respect her so greatly and how he’d have missed out on the woman who is, without compare, his truest friend. Perhaps his only friend. How the world would be dimmer had he ever actually followed through with those first, resentful intentions. How he’s been glancing at her when she isn’t looking, watching her hands and her shoulders and her legs.

He takes a deep breath and rubs his face. This isn’t the happy drunk he was going for.

She’s looking at him when he finally forces his eyes back to her face and of course she’s wearing concern like a tightly wrapped coat. That just makes it worse—his stewing over her and her with that expression. _You are an immeasurably lucky bastard, Nathaniel Howe,_ he tells himself.

“Mahariel, I—I’m so sorry—” He tries, but she pats his arm and steals the bottle away like she’s scooping up the last cake after dinner.

“You want to talk about pointy,” she says, grin wide and far too genuine for what’s just transpired. “You humans and all that skritchy hair.”

He feels his lip pull up; he ought to be chiding her—comforting him when she’s... but he can’t quite force himself to focus on anything right now, let alone trying to boss his headstrong Commander around when she’s nearing drunk. “ _Skritchy_ ,” he repeats. “The hell is _skritchy_?”

“Skritchy. ‘S a word.” She reaches toward him, clumsy fingertips scraping the scant bit of beard under his chin like she’s pampering Anders’ cat. He can’t find it in him to be uncomfortable with the gesture. “ _Skritchy._ ”

She leans back and brings the bottle to her lips and he leans forward, just a bit, trying to follow her hand. But he straightens up immediately, telling himself it was the booze, the dizziness in his head. Nothing else.

He does, however, shift along the floor until he’s no longer across from her but beside her, close enough nearly that their hips are touching. _It’s for reach,_ he’s convinced himself by the time he’s settled. _So she doesn’t have to lean over to pass it back to me._ And she hardly seems to notice, anyway.

She bumps his arm with the bottle and he takes it, swishing it around for good measure. Less than half left.

“You want to do something bad?”

He nearly chokes, sputtering through a cough and pushing the bottle toward her to free up his hands for patting his chest.

“Wh—what?”

“Let’s fuck with the Orlesians,” she says, whispering like they aren’t alone in the cellar. Her breath in his ear _does not_ help with the coughing. “Well, not _fuck_ with them, I mean. Just, you know, fuck around with them.”

“I’m, uh, not seeing the distinction.”

“Hide their clothes. Put dirt in their boots. You know. _Bother_ them.”

A war hero, what, three times over by now? And she wants to pull petty pranks on the very people she’s been trying to get them in good with? Oh, he loves it.

“Why?”

She rolls her eyes and points the lip of the bottle at him. “ _Why?_ You’re supposed to my Lieutenant, Nathaniel Howe. You’re my second-in-command, my partner, and you’re not going to help your Commander piss off a bunch of prissy Orlesians? I’m disappointed. I’m hurt. My heart is breaking as we sp—”

“Maker’s Breath, Mahariel, I didn’t say I wasn’t going to do it,” he says, but he’s still stuck on the words, on _partner,_ on _heart,_ on _my._ “I just want to know if there’s a particular _reason_ you want to piss off the prissy Orlesians, especially after you’ve worked so hard to get us to all get along.” Oh, that was a hard sentence to say. _All along, get to get us to... all all along._ Did he say that right? He nods, not because he’s sure he’s managed not to drunkenly mangle his words but because, yes, _this_ is the happily drunk he was aiming for.

“Well, Rolan is a fucking liar and I don’t like him. I’ve been thinking about killing him, actually.” Nathaniel isn’t sure if that’s the drink or a dryly delivered joke or if she’s serious. None of them would surprise him. “And Stroud pissed me off today.”

“Again? Do you two ever get along?” He takes the bottle and a quick sip and can’t say he’s not glad they butt heads so often. Prissy Orlesian constantly whining about his friends—complaining about Anders and Justice all the damned time with his funny accent and his moustache and Mahariel never fusses about Stroud shaving like she does about Nathaniel shaving; _‘s not bloody fair,_ he thinks. So good then, that they don’t like each other, that she doesn’t like him.

“What are you talking about? Stroud and I get along just fine.” Her words come low and unevenly paced. Less slurring, and he can tell she’s making a point of speaking as carefully as possible. Oh, he’ll get it out of her, he decides, swishing around the last bit of their wine. _You’re not going to play sober all night,_ he silently warns.

“When? I’ve never seen the two of you have a calm conversation.”

“You know, I do talk to people when you’re not around.” She points her finger at him, but it’s more sort of off to his right.

“Wh—I know that,” he recovers. “I just—I’d... Well, I know how Stroud is and I know how you are and—”

“Oh you do, do you? And how am I, Nathaniel Howe? Hm?” She leans in and he can smell the booze sweet on her, feel her breath on his face.  Maker, she is very close to his face.

“What? No. No, I meant I... I meant... fuck.”

“You’re quite eloquent when you drink. Tell me about my ears again.”

“They’re turning a bit pink,” he says, looking away just long enough to get some semblance of his wit back. “I believe you’re getting a bit drunk too, Mahariel.”

“Oh, I’ll be more than a bit drunk soon enough,” she laughs, pulling the bottle away from him and downing the last of the contents. “Come on, onward to the Orlesians. And when we’re done, we’re letting the dogs run wild in the Keep; we’ll start them singing even. The dogs _love_ it when I sing with them.”

“You sing with the dogs?” That’s certainly intriguing. Does Justice know about that, he wonders.

“Orlesians, Nathaniel!” She’s so impatient with him and when she says _Orlesians,_ it sounds like _Oral-leech-ants_ and she huffs when he laughs at her. _Finally,_ he thinks, and he wants to point at her and make a show—she’s slurring drunk and _this_ is equal footing between them.  Finally. But she throws up her hands and says again, louder, “It’s time for the Orlesians!” And she drags him up by his hands, freely offered.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Second half, shifts to Mahariel's POV. These two are such moody losers; I love them.

Mahariel grabs a third bottle on her way to the steps, Nathaniel’s hand loose in hers until she’s partway up and his hand is instead at her back and she’s glad for that because falling down drunk off the cellar stairs is not how the Vanquisher of the Fifth Blight should go out.

The short distance to her bedroom seems so dreadfully long, but when she finally gets there, she cracks the door open and sees Velanna curled up in one corner of the bed.

She shoves the bottle into Nathaniel’s hands and brings her finger to her lips. _Shhh._ But he doesn’t follow her in anyway, just peeks around the door while she rummages through her desk. Scissors, she needs scissors. On the battlefield, Mahariel can move quiet as a mouse, can flicker in and out of sight like a wispy thing, but when making an effort not to wake Velanna, she finds herself stepping on the creaky part of the floorboards, pulling on the squeaky desk drawer, dropping the little wooden horse she got for Oghren.

_Dammit._

When she comes back out, Nathaniel is leaning back against the wall, sucking long, heavy pulls from their bottle of liquid mischief. She just watches him for a minute—so unlike the few nobles she’s met and is he really even a noble anymore? Gods, she’s got him drunk and following her around the Keep in the middle of the night to pull pranks. Even the Wardens would turn up their noses—well, not _her_ Wardens, no, but _her_ Wardens are fun. Or they were before she pissed them all off by burning down a city.

She wonders if noblility—the kind his father had and the other kind that Nathaniel seems to think is real—runs in the blood, if it’s sort of like being Dalish. And she wonders if she’s really Dalish anymore. Would they even know her now, after all this time and all these changes? Would they let her stay? Would they call her an outsider and send her away?

Junar wouldn’t. Merrill and Ineria and Ashalle. Master Ilen.

But she’s not Mahariel and Tamlen anymore. Just Warden Fucking Commander.

She looks back through the crack of her door at Velanna snug in their bed. At least she has some trace of her people, another Dalish woman in the Wardens. Another Dalish who sees her for all she is and all she’s lost, even if she doesn’t know the names or the places or the regrets. Lethallin. Cousin. Sister.

“Mahariel?”

He’s looking at her like that again—like he does when she gets quiet. Damn him and his... focused drunkenness! How are they supposed to be happily drunk when she’s stewing in the hallway and he’s making that reassuring face he makes?

So she takes the bottle away from him and chugs down far more of it than she needs just now.

“You’re not drinking enough,” she teases, shaking the bottle at him.

 _Lots of fruit and barrels and tree bark,_ she’d told him. _A bit of dirt and an angry elder to chastise you._

“One day I’ll get some Dalish booze for you,” she says, watching him tip the wine up and a little trail of it run out of the corner of his mouth and down his chin. “It’ll knock you right on your ass though, I’m warning you now.”

His hair’s grown out a bit, she notes. It suits him. And her fingertips are tingling; the tip of her nose and her lips are buzzing numb.

“Let’s go get Rolan,” he says, his face almost as fierce as she’d felt when she’d first realized the lying bastard was, well, a lying bastard.

Rolan’s room isn’t far down the hall. She miscounts the doors though and ends up in the one Oghren shares with Justice—she should’ve known by the snoring she’d opened the wrong door. Quick adjustment, her feet getting a bit tangled underneath her when she turns to quickly back into the hallway.

“A bit drunk,” Nathaniel says, steadying her. “Just like I said.”

“Yes, well, I hope you have an awful hangover tomorrow as punishment for your teasing me. You shouldn’t talk to your Commander lick this— _like_ this. Fuck.” And she can’t help it, really she can’t; his eyes go so wide at the slip that she’s in a fit of giggling and he’s only recovered so much that he can clap his hand over her mouth.

“Commander, be quiet,” he says, smiling and holding back his own laughter with his other hand. Oh, they are a ridiculous pair—a man with noble name and noble ties and never to be a ‘noble’ but far more noble than most she’s met, and her an outcast elf with vallaslin and a clan long gone and not even able to quite square away the last time she sat chatting at a halla or said ‘aneth ara’ or ‘ma nuvenin Keeper.’ Neither of them what they were intended to be and they can’t even be what they’re supposed to in this damned hallway: quiet.

She recovers herself though—she’s got to, got to, _got to_ —if she’s going to get this done.

“I really ought to kill this bastard,” she mutters as they open Rolan’s door. He’s nowhere to be found. And she is not surprised. “Everyone else asleep in their beds and where the hell’s he got off to?”

“We’re not in our beds either,” Nathaniel reminds her.

_That’s different._

She yanks open Rolan’s drawers and rifles through his clothes while Nathaniel keeps watch at the door. _Fucking lying bronto humping son of—_

“I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense,” she hears Nathaniel say quietly behind her.

“What makes sense?”

When she looks over her shoulder at him he’s beet red, even in the dark and stiffens up so much she thinks he’ll snap a backbone. She cocks an eyebrow; whatever _this_ is all about, she has to know. But, oh, are his lips pursed tight. “What makes sense?”

“Y—you and Velanna being lovers.” He hitches his thumb toward the wall where, she realizes, a few rooms down, Velanna is asleep, curled up like a grumpy kitten in Mahariel’s bed. _Silly shems._

“Oh, Nathaniel Howe,” she says, wagging her eyebrows and her finger. “What _would_ your mother say?”

He takes another drink. _My, but he’s embarrassed._ It’s quite possibly the best thing she’s ever seen. She spares him though, and turns back to Rolan’s clothes, yanking out every pair of pants she can find and laying them out in a stack on the floor.

“Velanna and I are not lovers,” she says with a laugh. _Not that I haven’t considered it, of course,_ she doesn’t add; that’s not what he’d asked, after all. “I had no idea you humans slept so far apart; whole rooms to yourselves, whole wings of castles even. It’s so strange. Dalish—or, well, all the Dalish _I_ know anyway—we sleep together, sometimes in big groups around the fires or sometimes, when it’s cold out, a few of us huddled together in our aravels.”

“But—but what about privacy? And... Well, it just seems awfully... intimate,” he manages.

“I suppose it is,” is all she says. _Shems are so strange, so timid,_ she thinks. Alistair had blushed like an idiot when she’d asked him to stay with her in Arl Eamon’s estate.

_But I thought you didn’t—_

_I don’t, but we’re probably going to die soon and I don’t want to sleep by myself. Do you?_

_Not really, no._

_Then stop acting like a shem and stay here with me._

_So timid, so silly,_ she thinks. _So afraid to just ask for what they want._

“What’d he lie to you about anyway?” Nathaniel says, after another drink and a cough.

“He’s lying to everyone,” she says and she’s certain. Been as certain about very few things as she is about this. “I just don’t know what about. Yet.”

“Do you want _me_ to kill him then?”

She considers it. He’s wobbling drunk, sure enough, but he’ll do it if she tells him too. “No,” she finally decides, lifting what she thinks must be the last of Rolan’s trousers from his drawers. “I don’t think you should. I don’t want any of you mixed up in whatever he’s up to.”

“What are you going to do then?” He’s come over from the door and she hadn’t noticed—of course she hadn’t with the pounding starting in her head and her ears going numb and her trying to find all Rolan’s pants. He leans over her shoulder and reaches toward the drawer and when his wrist brushes her cheek, a thought skitters across her mind like a mouse across a floor and she startles far more for the mental image than she would for the rodent. _No, no,_ she says to herself. _You’ve got things to do._ She lifts a pair of pants from the pile on the floor.

“I’m going to rip the crotch out of all his trousers,” she says proudly, ripping one with her scissors to make her point.

One by one she rips them, jagged and with gaping holes that will require far more effort than a quick stitching, and shoves them back into the drawer just as she found them.

Lucky for her that Rolan doesn’t return. Or unlucky that he’s off doing whatever it is he’s doing, the lying bastard.

She nods and waves him after her, out the door and back into the hall and she’s not quite sure what they ought to do next. She’ll be tired soon enough—she always gets like that after a few hours—but for now, she’s not quite ready to end anything.

He taps on her shoulder and says, “Aren’t you going to sing to the dogs?”

“Oh! Yes! That’s a lovely idea!”

She grabs the bottle—very nearly empty now—and leads him out to the kennels. Her bare skin stings pleasantly when she steps across the courtyard, night frost crunching under the soft arch of her feet. She loves being cold, although it sobers her up a bit and she’s not quite in the mood for that, so she drinks almost all that’s left and leaves him just a bit.

“Hello my brave warriors,” she coos, arms wide for the onslaught of wardog kisses. Nathaniel sticks his tongue out; she’s covered in happy dog slobber.

“Our clan had a mabari once,” she tells him over her shoulder as she claps the dogs to attention. “Well, sort of.”

“Didn’t you have one during the Blight?”

The mabari circle around her, sitting dutifully at her feet. “I still have one,” she says, thinking quite fondly of her hound. “He’s with Alistair for now. And gods, was that dog ever angry with me for making him go. You’d think I’d told him I was going to jump off a bloody cliff for all the whining he did. But _someone_ has to watch after Alistair.” She turns back to the dogs—lots of dogs left wandering after the Blight and she’d picked them up along the way, Anora had sent a few, some were even left over from the Howe’s and they’d all assimilated quite well. _Mabari might be as clever as halla,_ she decides. “Alright ladies and gentlemen,” she says. “Let’s have a round.”

She’s not sung in front of anyone for a long while and probably she’d not be doing it now, but she lets herself relax: she’s in good company after all, her clever wardogs and Nathaniel and just the dark and the snow that’s waiting up in the sky to fall.

It’s not even a good song, really, nothing that’s ever mattered to her, not like the lullabies she’d sung to Tamlen’s baby brother, or the melodies she’d stayed up late to hear Ineria singing. It’s just some drinking song she’d heard in the tavern in Redcliffe and it’d stuck with her. But the dogs get to howling like wolves and she can’t keep the grin off her face. Good sports, these dogs. Good singers, too. A thousand times better than Hahren Paivel ever was. Is. Was? No, _is._

 _I walk in the bar and my fellows all cheer_  
_Order me up some whiskey and beer_  
 _You ask me why I’m singing this song_  
 _Some call it Tavern but I call it Home_

“You know,” she says to him, over the din of the still howling dogs. “I think it’s the worst song I’ve ever heard.”

Nathaniel hunkers down beside her and, quite to her surprise, he holds her hand. It’s cold and it’s dark and the dogs are bawling loud enough to wake everyone in the keep and it just hits her how much she misses Varel, so she’s glad to have Nathaniel to hang on to.

“You were right,” he laughs.

“About how terrible the song was? Yes.”

“About the dogs,” he says. “But, yes, the song too.”

There’s the sound of a door slamming behind them and a distinctly Orlesian (and distinctly moustached, she knows) voice growing louder with approach. “—damned Fereldens and their dogs—”

And she’s half a mind to wait and tell Stroud he can shove his Orlesian snobbery right up—but Nathaniel’s got her hand and is pulling her along and she’s wondering when she started thinking of herself as “Dalish First, Ferelden Second.” When she’d started thinking of herself as _anything,_ second.

Stroud’s not the only awake it seems—she can hear banging and fussing and Orlesian voices damning Fereldan doglords from one end of the Keep to the other and perhaps she ought not to be grinning so proudly but she is and her hands are numb with cold and drink—her toes too, now she thinks of it—and she’s not quite sure when Nathaniel got them in this closet but they’d just missed the Orlesian mage stomping down this hallway, muttering curses about “the nonsense these people get up to in the night” so it’s really as good a place to hide as any.

“You still got that bottle,” she whispers.

He nods and makes to give it to her but she pushes it back toward him, scooting a bit closer to him herself. “A toast,” she says, quiet as she can manage. “To your sister, and to your nephew.”

He leans in and whispers into her hair. “And to you, Commander.”

She’s touched, honestly, until he laughs and adds, “The most troublesome woman I’ve ever met.” Then she elbows him in the ribs and his resulting _umph_ is quite satisfying.

But he smiles and takes his drink and she finds herself leaning into him; she’s tired and he’s warm and they are, after all, in a closet hiding from Orlesians and something about the prospect of Stroud opening the door and finding her here makes her spitefully happy. _In case you still thought I was the dignified hero you people try so hard to make me._

“You know,” she tells Nathaniel as he leans back against the wall, his arm around her to keep her from falling over as he shifts. “When I joined the Wardens, I thought they were supposed to be heroes.”

“You don’t think so anymore?” His fingers are dragging through her hair and she’s not sure when he started, but it’s nice.

“No. And I never wanted to be one anyway.”

“A Warden? Or a hero?”

“Both. Either.” She remembers Nathaniel, when he’d followed her back from Amaranthine, found them on the road and begged to be Joined. He thought he’d be bringing some honor back to his name, to his family, to himself maybe. And now here he is, hiding in a closet with her, stone drunk. Yet never has he seemed to regret it. She wonders where he gets that contentment, that drive to keep on going here. “I never cared about saving the world,” she continues. “Just about... just my clan, the people I love. And then—”

He laughs, silent, of course, but she can hear it in his breath, can feel it in the way his chest heaves beneath her. “Don’t tell me you had a change of heart?”

“Just kept finding more people,” she says and she doesn’t know if she’s happy or sad. Just that she’s had alot to drink and that she’s wanted to say that for a while. “Alistair and Morrigan and Zevran. Anders and Sigrun and you. Every time I think I’m done, more of you show up. You people are bloody exhausting, keeping me here.” She laughs, but he doesn’t because they’re neither of them quite sure what _here_ means.  

It’s quiet for a bit. A few Orlesians stomp past, making their way back to their beds.

“I hope you forget all my sulking in the morning,” she says suddenly, when she feels herself falling asleep. “We're supposed to be celebrating and I'm making all this flowery talk about you ridiculous lot being ‘my people.’ Sentimental nonsense.”  _Silly shems,_ she'd thought,  _so afraid to just ask for what they want._ And her, so afraid to just say that she...

He pulls her a bit closer to him, his arm around her shoulders and what feels very much like lips pressed against the top of her hair. “Probably,” he says and he’s as tired as she is, she can tell. “And you can forget I said I’m glad to be one of them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lyrics are from "Fuck you, I'm drunk" (which is a *great* drinking song; Mahariel is just wrong).


End file.
